Everything in its place

Nearly a month ago, I wrote a post titled Evernote Smackdown where I talked about how I prefer Evernote to DEVONthink Pro (DTP) for daily use, but that I was not giving up DTP.

Today, I finally got my DTP databases in order. When I first got the exclusive Mac program I dumped everything in one huge database. That got unwieldy so I split everything up into separate databases by topic, which was also hard to manage under version 1.x because it only allowed one database to be open at a time.

Version 2.x came along (it’s still in beta) with the ability to open multiple databases and that made it tons easier to manage more than one database, but the artificial intelligence—the program’s claim to fame—broke down because all of my data was split up so back into one database it went.

Well, almost one.

Now I’ve got three databases; at least for now. They are labeled “Research Database,” “Creativity,” and “Life.” Here is what they are for:

• My Research Database is the big boy. All of the smaller databases got cleaned up and moved into here. It mainly consists of two larger groups—Topics and Digital Library.

  Topics is my A-Z file where I dump in whatever stuff I want to track such as articles on productivity, philosophy, politics and some other topics that don’t begin with the letter “P”.

  Digital Library is my collection of works organized by author. It contains everything from digitized novels to magazine articles to transcriptions of college commencement speeches.

• My Creativity database is where I keep my personal work. Blog posts, articles I’m working on, and notes & ideas for future work (like the Next Great American Southern Gothic Novel™).
• For a record of things happening in the real world I have my Life database. It gets all of my financial information and household ephemera (cleaning tips, chore lists for kids, and ideas for local dining and entertainment options).

Enough tweaking now. DTP is ready to spit my collected stuff back at me in a logical fashion. Evernote is ever present to grab data for me no matter where I am; home, work, or on the road. Everything is ready and now it’s time to start. So on that note, I leave you with this bit from a wonderful article by Merlin Mann:

Just really asking yourself how you know whether you have enough of anything—be it information, tools, skills, or coffee—just to literally start. Just start. Not forever. Just for now. Start.